This was a brutally hot day of walking and I took a number of breaks during the day and rested in some shade. For a large part of the walk you are taunted by water because you are walking along the side of the mountain and way down below there is a river with flowing water you can hear. There are also points where the water pools and you look down and think how great that would be to just jump into. At one point trail does go down to the river but at this point you are warned not to drink the water at all or submerge your head because the water has been contaminated with human waste. This spot is apparently popular to the locals for clothing optional recreation. When I passed through I did not see any evidence of that but while I was making my way out (what goes down on the PCT always goes back up) there were a number of people heading down to the pools from other paths. Once you leave that one spot you are back on the side of the mountain and the river is way too far below and too steep to allow you to go down. Eventually you walk your way out of the valley at the Mojave Dam and at this point the trail once again dips down to the river which has a good flow. I was so hot and on my emergency reserve of water and so I once again did something a little stupid. As soon as I saw a side trail down to the river, I took it. It was about 1/3 of a mile down and pretty steep and I went down and crashed by the side of the river and had something to eat and filled up my water containers and then climbed back up to the PCT. 7/10 of a mile later the trail naturally went down to the very same river containing the very same water. Just looking ahead on the map I could have saved myself a lot of energy. So at this point the trail is pretty close to civilization and there is farm land below the trail with little ponds of water and cattle grazing. I went on a little further and then set up camp after a 16.25 mile day. It was a good day. Just before I camped and just after crossing Hwy 173 there was a water cache as well with lots of perfect store bought water. It is amazing that people do this for us hikers. I am so grateful. I went about 1 mile past the cache and set up my tent, got into my sleeping clothes (short pants and a thermal underwear top) and started to prepare the evening meal.
The meals I have a prepackaged freeze dried meals. They are amazing in taste and variety. This night I was going to have Santa Fe Chicken. What you do is bring 2.5 cups of hot water to a boil, poor the boiling water into the pouch, stir it up, seal the pouch by its press and seal, and wait about 15 minutes and you have a meal. The only issue with this procedure is that I don’t have anything really long enough to stir the meal before sealing. No issue, I carefully slosh the mixture around, then seal the pouch, and then kind of massage the package and tilt it this way and that until I believe it has been mixed good. I do not know if from that description you can sense a disaster about to happen…. it generally works out great. This time however, I apparently got too rough with the massages and tilting and the seal burst open and the whole mess of boiling water and food came crashing down on the top of my leg and knee. Holly crap.. just a bit of pain. Looking down at my knee there were 2 clear spots where the first layer of skin had been removed and a very large burned area. I was not happy using the water I had (taken from rivers and treated) to try and clean a burn area and so I hustled back to the water cache, got a gallon of water, and try to clean and cool the area with lots of water. The area hurt pretty bad for a couple of hours but then subsided and I figured I would wait until morning to see what I was going to do. I did fix another meal and ate it all. Something Thai with noodles. It was good. I expected the pain to increase during the night but it did not. There was a quail nearby that sang me to sleep. Quite a noisy fellow and I was surprised at how long into the dark hours he sang.
